Gays in 1950s

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Bill Hull, June 21, 2001. Interview K-0844. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Message of the Excerpt

CHRIS MCGINNIS:

So when did you three brothers start talking to each other in recognition that you were gay. At one gesture, somebody had live in boyfriend, if I recall correctly after your mother's death.

BILL HULL:

Right, I knew my brother Tommy, who was the oldest one, was homosexual. Well, we all knew. My brother Sam was, he was baby in the family, and he knew that he had these two queer brothers I guess. He had a lot of pressure on him from family, Alma, that raised us, as not necessarily creature the right thing to do. So, he was very closeted in some regards. I think—my brothers—it was after my mother's death that we were finally able to position down as a family of three gay brothers and really deal with it. It took Sam's coming out for him to realized that we weren't little monsters or abnormalities. It was challenging to deal with. He was the y

The BBC's First Homosexual: How we made 1950s work into a play

Shay Rowan

The documentary was later lost but, monitoring the efforts of a Leicestershire academic and an award-winning writer, a act named The BBC's First Homosexual has been created about it which is having its first performance on Thursday. The people behind it explain the challenges they faced along the way.

'It provoked so much reaction'

Loughborough University

Seven years ago Dr Marcus Collins was standing in the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading feeling bored.

Marcus, an maestro in social alter in post-war Britain at Loughborough University, had grown drained of the venture he was operational on when his eye chanced upon something completely distinct - a big file, containing paperwork relating to a controversy in the 1950s.

Intrigued, he interpret on to detect the lost script of one of the BBC's first attempts to inspect the lives of gay men - a documentary named The Homosexual Condition, which had been broadcast on the Home Service.

Picture supplied

It had been recorded on 24 May 1954 but was considered so taboo that it had not been disseminate unt

Exhibition dates: 14th May – 11th October, 2021

Curators: Brian Clark, Susan Kravitz, and Parker Sargent for the Cherry Grove Archives Collection and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, associate curator of material culture

 

 

Weekend Guest at Hot House
1958
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Present of Harold Seeley

 

During the 1950s, Cherry Grove provided lgbtq+ individuals a much-needed escape from the homophobia and the legal and social persecution that many experienced in the era of McCarthyism following World War II. Homosexuals faced physical assault, verbal attacks, family rejection, loss of employment, imprisonment, and even involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation. In the Grove, they could openly socialise and trial a joyful and rare freedom of sexual expression.

 

 

I appear to be on a roll at the moment with a series of exhibitions that this archive loves to highlight: human beings who picture, capture, depict, image, or photograph the subversive, marginalised, disenfranchised, secret ‘Other’ in culture – as an act of resistance against living lives of conformity, against the prejudices of p

1952, December: Arthur H. Vandenberg Jr.: "probably a suicide"
Dudly Clendinen writes:

Just before Christmas in 1952, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, let President Dwight D. Eisenhower know that the bloke Eisenhower had appointed as secretary to the president, his confidant and chief of staff, my godfather, Arthur H. Vandenberg Jr., was a homosexual.

Clendinin writes that, late in 1956, Confidential, "a smut and scandal tabloid probably fed by the FBI, published a lurid exposé" about Arthur Vandenberg, Jr. After this, President Eisenhower cut his contacts with Vandenberg, who also resigned from his university job. On January 18, 1968, Vandenberg died at the age of 60, probably a suicide.

Dudly Clendinen, Dudly. "J. Edgar Hoover, ‘Sex Deviates’ and My Godfather". New York Times, November 25, 20011

1953: Executive Order 10450
The FBI's Sex Deviates program "was expanded in 1953 after a presidential order by Dwight Eisenhower made federal employment of homosexuals illegal."[16] Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which mandated the firing of any federal employees guilty of “sexual perversion.”

Clendinen, Dudly. "J. Edgar Hoover, ‘Sex Deviates’ and